The present disclosure relates to a method and an apparatus for predicting a power gain generated due to a packet transmission delay and determining a packet transmission time using the predicted power gain by a mobile device.
FIG. 1 is a view illustrating the state of a modem of a general mobile device. Here, for the convenience of description, an example in which the mobile device is a Long Term Evolution (LTE) device will be described. However, the embodiment of the present disclosure may be applied to communication devices, to which a delay time for the following state transition may be applied.
Referring to FIG. 1, in an idle situation in which packets are neither transmitted nor received, a modem of the mobile device stays in a Radio Resource Control (RRC)_IDLE state 100, in which a communication channel with a cellular network is released. Furthermore, in order to transmit and receive the packet, the state of the modem is transitioned 105 to an RRC_CONNECTED state 110 that has a communication channel with a cellular network. During the transition 105, a considerable power overhead is generated. In order to prevent this, the modem in the RRC_CONNECTED state 110 is delayed for a predetermined time period until the modem is transitioned 120 to the RRC_IDLE state 100 after the transmission/reception of the packet is completed. The predetermined time period is generally called a tail time. If packets are not successively transmitted or received within the tail time, a lot of power is wasted.
In order to prevent the waste, when a request for the transmission of a packet that may be transmission-delayed is generated, the mobile device delays the transmission of the packet and transmits the packet together with another packet generated after in order to use a technique for reducing the power that is consumed by the modem. However, when the packet transmission delay is used, power may be wasted due to the transmission delay of the corresponding packet.